UnderCover Girl
by Kay Taylor
Summary: Tonks, during her Hogwarts years.


Tonks had never fit in at Hogwarts. No, that was a lie; she fit in _too well_, and that in itself was conspicuous. Everyone you look at, schoolgirl or not, has some distinguishing feature. Most of them have a few spots, here and there. Some have hair that won't tie back or won't stay flat or won't grow out of that awkward-fringe stage. A few have wand burns, just above the curve of their wrists, where an over-eager teenage hand has twizzled the wand too dramatically and seared the skin bright, shiny pink. None of that for Tonks, who arrived at Hogwarts with vivid purple hair and green eyes, but within a few days was a uniform four-foot-ten with long brown hair, brown eyes, freckles.   
  
She had wanted to fit in so badly, that within a day she was sick of people craning their heads after her swish of purple hair in the corridors. So - even though purple was her favourite colour, that year, a deep rich indigo shade she'd taken from the cover of her Transfigurations textbook - she'd tried red, since that was at least a colour that real people had. But that hadn't worked, either. So brown it was, and bound up tightly in a plait, a mousy-brown plait which she sometimes ran her fingers through in lessons, thinking that really, it'd be so much nicer blue, but when she tried it for a few hours the other Gryffindors had laughed themselves sick, and that had made her give up.  
  
So that was Tonks at school, as the photographs in her album show her. She wears the school jumper slightly _too small_ to be real - because they stretch in the wash, anyone could have told her that - and her socks are falling down, even though a simple spell could have taken care of that. A schoolgirl's approximation of a schoolgirl, with big brown eyes and a smile that's slightly too large, too startling, for her face.   
  
The girls in her dormitory fuss over hair-straightening potions and frizz remover late at night; copies of _Witch Weekly_ are passed around. Jenny and Athena plait each others' hair and secure the braids with tiny, tiny beads, until they jangle as they walk, and Tonks wonders whether their heads must get tired.  
  
Sitting cross-legged on her bed in her pyjamas (striped, cotton, unexceptional), Tonks quietly changes her hair from gold to orange to red and back again, holding a handful up to the light.  
  
You'd think that after seven years of looking as ordinary as possible (making the hair a little longer every season, carefully, until it reached the small of her back because she'd forgotten that everyone else got haircuts), Tonks would have had a hundred and one things to change into, the minute she stepped off the Hogwarts Express back in the dusty London summer. You'd be wrong.   
  
She stood on the platform and examined herself in a tiny compact mirror, folded away in her shirt pocket, noticing that the eyes were still the exact same shade of brown, the freckles were exactly where she'd placed them, with mathematical precision - exactly ten on each cheek. And slowly, carefully, she started making her eyes green, as she'd been longing to do for seven years.  
  
After that, it was harder. When the last of her friends had left the platform, trailing trunks and owls and broomsticks, Tonks changed the long brown plait into tight blonde curls. And then back again, because it didn't look _right_, to someone who'd been a schoolgirl's schoolgirl for years (and her socks were still falling down, and her jumpers were still slightly too small, too clean, too new). She looked around, guiltily, expecting to see someone, as if she'd been caught playing with her mother's make-up.   
  
It took her four months in London before she decided on bright green, just for a change, just to give the place a bit of colour.   
  
But as she left the platform for the last time, she remembered the last _Witch Weekly_ cover, cooed over by Athena and Jenny even while they were in the last panicky weeks of NEWTS and goodbye parties. The girl had black hair, and blue eyes. Tonks decided that really, that was good enough to be getting on with. And walked away looking like the cover girl's sister, wondering if she dared put pink stripes in all that glossy, _normal_ ebony hair.


End file.
